In This Article
Somewhere on your Seller Central dashboard sits a number most sellers glance at and never think about until it changes colour. That number is your Account Health Rating, and it is one of the few metrics on Amazon that can end your ability to trade overnight if you let it slide.
The frustrating part is that Amazon explains it in fragments, scattered across help pages. Plenty of sellers only piece the system together after a warning email arrives, which is the worst possible time to learn how it works.
This guide pulls the whole picture together: how the score is calculated, what moves it up and down, which metrics feed it, and what you can do to keep your account comfortably in the green.
How the Score Actually Works
The Account Health Rating, usually shortened to AHR, is a numeric score from 0 to 1,000 that Amazon assigns to every seller. It measures how well you comply with Amazon's policies across a rolling 180-day window of selling activity. New accounts start at 200, which is simply the baseline, not a penalty.
The score moves in both directions. On the way up, you earn 4 points for every 200 successfully fulfilled orders across that 180-day window, so consistent sales volume slowly builds you a buffer. Points are also restored when you successfully resolve a violation. On the way down, policy violations cost between 2 and 8 points depending on severity, repeat violations double the deduction, and a critical violation drops your score straight to 0 regardless of where it was sitting.
The colour bands are what most sellers actually see. Green covers 200 to 1,000 and means your account is healthy. Yellow covers 100 to 199 and means you are at risk and need to act immediately. Red covers 0 to 99, at which point your account is eligible for immediate deactivation, with a 3-day grace period.
One detail worth absorbing early: a score of 200 provides exactly the same protection as a score of 900. The AHR is a buffer against deactivation, not a grade to maximise.
The Metrics That Feed It
Three areas of your operation determine where the score goes, and Amazon measures each of them separately.
The first is customer service performance. Your Order Defect Rate must stay below 1% across a 60-day window, and it is built from three inputs: your negative seller feedback rate, your A-to-Z Guarantee claim rate, and your credit card chargeback rate. Alongside that, Amazon expects you to respond to buyer messages within 24 hours, and yes, that includes weekends.
The second is shipping performance, which applies if you fulfil orders yourself. Your Late Shipment Rate needs to stay below 4%, your Pre-Fulfilment Cancel Rate below 2.5%, your Valid Tracking Rate above 95%, and your On-Time Delivery Rate above 90%, though Amazon recommends 95%.
The third is policy compliance, where the target is simple and unforgiving: zero unresolved violations. Amazon tracks intellectual property violations, authenticity complaints, product condition complaints, food and product safety issues, listing policy violations, and restricted product violations.
If you use Fulfilment by Amazon, there is a meaningful concession here. FBA sellers are not held responsible for Late Shipment Rate, Pre-Fulfilment Cancel Rate, Valid Tracking Rate, or On-Time Delivery Rate, because Amazon owns the fulfilment. It does nothing for your Order Defect Rate or policy compliance, but it removes an entire category of ways to damage the score.
How Violations Hit the Score
Not all violations are equal, and the point deductions reflect that. Low-severity violations cost around 2 points. Medium-severity violations deduct 2 to 4 points. High-severity violations take 4 to 8 points, and if you repeat the same type of violation, that deduction doubles. Critical violations skip the arithmetic entirely and drop your score to 0, with a 72-hour window to respond before deactivation proceedings begin.
Two things catch sellers out here. The first is that several small violations can do more damage than one major one, because the deductions stack and repeat offences double. A string of minor listing flags, shrugged off, can drag you into yellow territory faster than one serious complaint handled properly.
The second is the deletion myth. Deleting a listing does not make its violation disappear. The violation stays on your account health dashboard, and the points stay gone, until you address it through the proper process.
There is one habit that matters more than any single metric: watch your emails and account health notifications closely. If Amazon gives you a deadline to respond to a violation and you miss it, the violation is confirmed automatically, no matter how strong your evidence was. Plenty of winnable cases are lost to an unread email.
Recent Changes and Account Health Assurance
Amazon has been tightening this system rather than relaxing it. Seller feedback moved to a star-only format in August 2025. On-Time Delivery Rate enforcement ramped up through 2024 and 2025. And enforcement generally has become stricter, with AI-driven risk evaluations doing more of the initial flagging. In practice, violations are now raised by automated systems at scale, with humans arriving later in the process, if at all. The bar for a clean account is higher than it was two years ago.
The counterweight is Account Health Assurance, a free programme that gives qualifying sellers a 72-hour protection window: rather than deactivating your account outright, Amazon commits to working with you for 72 hours to resolve the issue first. Eligibility requires a Professional account, an AHR of 250 or above maintained for six months, and a valid emergency contact number on file.
That eligibility bar is the one good reason to aim above the 200 floor. A score of 250 buys no extra protection on its own, but holding it for six months qualifies you for a programme that can save your account when something goes wrong.
What Sellers Get Wrong About the Score
The most common mistake is treating the AHR like a school grade and chasing 1,000. It is wasted effort. Anything from 200 upwards is equally safe, and 250 held for six months gets you Account Health Assurance. Beyond that, the number is cosmetic.
The reverse mistake is panicking at a falling score when nothing is actually wrong. Because points accrue with fulfilled orders, a quiet trading period can drag the score down without a single violation. A drop may reflect declining sales volume rather than wrongdoing, so check the violations list before assuming the worst.
And the score is not a shield. A high AHR does not prevent deactivation for fraud or other serious misconduct. Amazon reserves the right to act immediately on genuine bad behaviour regardless of what the number says.
How to Protect Your Rating
Start with anything outstanding on your account health dashboard, because resolving violations restores points and nothing else recovers the score as quickly. From there, run your metrics with headroom: treat 1% ODR and 4% late shipments as cliff edges to stay well back from, not targets to hover beside.
Answer every buyer message within 24 hours, keep supplier invoices and authorisation documents somewhere you can retrieve them within the hour, and audit your listings regularly for policy drift before Amazon finds it for you. If unfair feedback lands, request its removal rather than absorbing the hit.
If self-fulfilled shipping metrics keep hurting you, moving those products to FBA takes four of them off your scorecard entirely. Most of this is monitoring discipline rather than cleverness, which is exactly why it gets neglected.
Where to Get Help
The monitoring side of account health automates well, and honestly, little of it needs AI. Pulling your metrics on a schedule, flagging when a number drifts towards a threshold, and sending deadline reminders for open violations is straightforward rule-based work that tools like Power Automate, Make or Zapier handle comfortably. The judgement calls, like how to respond to a violation notice, remain human work.
If you would rather have someone build that monitoring and keep an experienced eye on your account health day to day, that is what Fulcrum Three does.
Catch the risks that erode an Account Health Rating before they cost you the account.
Book a Free Operations Audit →